How many times has she gone over it in her head?
Rainbow brushes her mane away from her eyes for the upteenth time, frowning down at the piece of magical jewelry on the floor of her cloud house. The red gem glimmers with rainbow light. Present, yet dim compared to the brilliant display that used to play deep within its facets. More stark is the ugly crack nearly splitting it in two, right down the middle.
She imagines taking to the air, splitting through the cloudscape, feeling the sun against her outstretched wings, a bracing draught of life.
She imagines plunging down, spinning, following a familiar course through the currents that would be pulling her subtly off course at this time of morning.
Imagines alighting, softly as a feather, before that treehouse.
Knocking with that same old rhythm.
Twilight, face closed off, blank as one of the older tomes brought out for reference.
“Hey,” Dash says weakly. Nothing. She digs their journal out of her saddlebags, dangling it faux-casually from her wingtip. “I was having some trouble with that one maneuver we were talking about.”
She cuts herself off before the tremble reaches her voice, studying Twilight’s face for any sign, any at all. But that mare always did have an excellent poker face. So she soldiers on, “I was thinking, if you have some time free, we could maybe go over it? With that reference we were using before? Since, we never did finish…”
Dash trails off. Twilight’s face finally twitches, going from wood to stone. Finally, finally, she opens her mouth, and speaks in that same perfectly, impossibly polite Princess Voice she uses whenever some strange pony tries to barge into the library in the small hours. “I’m terribly sorry, Rainbow Dash. My hooves are full today, but I could locate that reference for you if you give me a tick.”
Any further words die on Dash’s tongue at the too-formal tone, the polite dismissal. She swallows the lump in her throat, turns, and darts off somewhere, anywhere, before Twilight, before any pony can see her dignity spilling from her eyes.
Rainbow blinks, staring at the broken Element in front of her, a stinging drop escaping her eyes and landing with a faint hiss and sizzle on the malfunctioning piece of jewelry. She shoves it to the side with a huff, shaking her wings out behind her with a crackle of electricity.
What they need—no, what she needs, Dash is honest enough with herself to admit—is a good, old fashioned battle for Harmony. Something with stakes, where she can pull out all the stops, show that she is still Loyalty, where and when it counts. Something to wipe away the bitter tears and spilled words and angry, angry lies, truth bent and twisted into something barbed and wicked and cruel.
As if it would be that easy.
They avoided each other, mostly, or maybe it was just Dash. Twilight was always perfectly cordial whenever they crossed paths. Always a friend, yet when contrasted with the warmth they’d had, that frank friendliness hurt, tore her up inside, left her with a stomach full of worms and a tongue that tripped and stumbled over itself. Better, easier, to run her errands with the clouds between her and any chance of that happening again.
She shakes her head and tosses the memories to the side, but they bubble up again, relentless, the ache resurfacing. Those papers she’d gone through all those hoops to gather up the data for, endlessly irritating distraction at the time, now tinged with a nostalgic glow. Always, always, after the next batch of tests, she’d fly down by Twi’s side, stare at parchment filled with figures that made no sense, and share a nuzzle, tender and affectionate, saying everything without words.
Rainbow misses those moments.
She heaves a deep, shuddering sigh, counting, another of Twilight’s techniques that really did make sense when she laid it all out in that way she did, explaining the how and the why with that infinite patience, while Rainbow listened, somehow never feeling condescended to as she nestled against her side.
She misses them an awful lot.
Then she breathes, two, picturing the sun, feeling its warmth, crackling in an endless void, time ticking in time with her breath, three, reality fading back into focus around her. It seems less colorful than memory.
She has her routine. Weatherwork. Their other friends. Some, only hers. Hobbies, though they’re more like distractions, keeping her mind busy in the trail of clouds as she tries once more to assemble a self-contained water cycle in the space of a single cloud. She’s on autopilot a lot of the time, a lazy fog over her mind, keeping her moving as time passes on.
She wonders how often Twilight thinks of her. She doesn’t seem to, on those glimpses she catches of her strolling around town, chatting with Spike without a care in the world. Moved on, with Dash the one left in the dust this time. And no matter what she does, she can’t catch up. Can’t leave the past where it belongs. Digging and digging and digging at her memories, picking at them like an old scar, the mental wound only worsening as she does.
In her mind, Twilight screams at her. Seethes. Open disgust, hatred, rage, anything but that empty, polite, closed-off expression that always greets her these days. Anything raw and vulnerable and honest, the Twilight she got back when she had no idea what it signified.
How does she get these thoughts out of her head? Dash shakes herself again, a full-body quiver that utterly disrupts the tiny ecosystem she had almost worked out in front of her.
The normal they’d settled into felt like a broken bone, unset, grating. Nothing was forgiven, nothing was fixed, nothing settled, Dash saw it in her eyes, every single time. Felt it in her bones, her heart, aching.
She thinks about continuing where they’d left off. The journal, spread out in front of her, diagram of a pegasus in flight, measurements of where exactly Dash’s magical field extended during different activities, stress levels, and a hundred other things which felt dull and pointless and exhausting to think about without that patient voice and hoof by her side.
Dash’s thoughts trend toward the obsessive. She’d say they were loyal, but she had a broken necklace and a polite smile proving that she wasn’t. Spinning around and around, circling the drain, taking her time and energy and attention and leaving only a bone-deep weariness behind.
“I just want the impossible,” she says to the empty sky. “Can’t be too hard. I’ve pulled it off before. Heck, Twilight’s flat-out gone back in time. So it can be done.”
No matter that doing so came with the risk of putting one hoof out of place and erasing herself utterly from existence, and the near-certainty of making the situation worse rather than better. At this point, if she had a horn, she would’ve tried anyway.
She freezes in midair, wings stilling, held aloft solely through her magical field.
There was a certain blue unicorn who may just be crazy enough to try that spell, if Dash was persuasive enough. If she said just the right things at just the right times. With how often she’d stared at the spellform, passing that along was the next best thing to easy.
Well. She’ll give it a shot.
